some of you may have come across the KindlePDFViewer (KPV) application in the past. Since a couple of month, we - the development team - tried to port its functionality over to touch based devices like the Kindle 5 (Touch) and the Kindle Paperwhite. The effort has now gotten far enough to warrant a first official release.

Since KindlePDFViewer got support for many more document formats than just PDF, that called for a new name. We settled on KOReader as the new name.

Moderator Notice

KOReader, which runs on several brands of devices, now has a dedicated forum of its own.

From now on, please address any general questions about KOReader (anything which applies equally no matter what device you are running KOReader on) in the KOReader forum.
Going forward, let's dedicate this thread to issues which involve KOReader-on-Kindles only (e.g. device integration, getting KOReader to run, anything where it matters that you are using a Kindle and not a Kobo/Pocketbook/Android).

This ensures that the Kindle experts can help you with Kindle-specific problems, and the KOReader experts can help you with KOReader-specific problems.

KUAL integration: The reader comes with configuration files for KUAL (and, which doesn't make much sense right now, also for launchpad - but there is only support for touch input so far in the application).

alternatively, you can use KPV Booklet to launch KOReader

Open Source Software: you're invited to help us and start hacking on KOReader! The frontend is coded in Lua, so you need only an editor to get going.

KOReader is still in an early stage. You will notice some inconveniences, some incoherences in the user interface and maybe even a bug here and there. Feel free to ask questions in this thread and report bugs in our issue tracker (link at the bottom of this posting). Documentation is lacking. Help is welcome!

There is currently no support for pure keyboard-based devices. For those, you're encouraged to have a look at the stable version - KindlePDFViewer. An alternative, especially for the Kindle 4 (NT) is Librerator, a fork of KindlePDFViewer.

However, it is already usable - so feel free to give it a try. And of course, expect updates, so come back and check this post from time to time.

I installed the latest Nightly Build and it crashes!
You decide: Either invest time and get in contact with the developers to help debugging. But please check beforehand if this is already actively discussed. But then, you could also decide to not bother. Nightly Builds are untested almost by definition and there will always be some builds that don't work at all, don't work fully, etc. etc.

Thanks! Let it get settled for a moment, I guess we'll have a flurry of updates in the coming days and weeks to really bring it in shape. It's still a bit rough around the edges. Still some work to do.

This is probably a good place to say big thanks to other contributors, first and foremost to @chrox and @houqp (Github names) who did awesome work to make this happen.

Launchpad's custumupdates macro was a simple script that
- checked the folder "customupdates" for any ZIP files
- if there were some, it would extract them to the /mnt/us (usb drive root) file system and delete the ZIP if successfully extracted

That allowed easy installation for apps - just drop a ZIP file in the "customupdates" folder, run the macro - done.

I guess such a thing could easily be made available for KUAL, too. Question is, however, if KUAL should be extended with such a script - I guess the discussion about that should go to the KUAL thread.

Hooray! Can I just update the older nightlies from Chrox's repo with the new ones - is it a simple update like that?
And thanks!

The former builds of kindlepdfviewer-touch are deprecated and replaced by new koreader. However, the history files of kindlepdfviewer-touch are completely compatible with koreader. Actually the last nightly build of kindlepdfviewer-touch is byte-to-byte identical to the first build of koreader except some differences of file names. You can have a fresh installation of koreader and move kindlepdfviewer/history directory into koreader directory. BTW, If you installed KPVBooklet to launch Kindlepdfviewer directly from Kindle home screen, you need to update KPVBooklet to version 0.4.3 or above to launch Koreader in the same way.

For the Kindle 4, currently Librerator is recommended (as is written - and linked to! - in the OP). I doubt that there will be a K4 version of the new KOReader code base faster than there will be a K2/KDX/K3 one.

I managed to jailbreak, install KUAL, and install the application on my brand new Kindle Paperwhite (one day old) without any issues. I am on Kindle firmware version 5.3.4 (explicitly updated), the matching jailbreak, matching KUAL.

With koreader-v2013.03-18-g66d7de0.zip, I seem to be unable to terminate the KOReader application?

Whenever I touch the "Home" button in the upper toolbar, I always get taken back to the FileManager, but never to the Kindle main screen?

In the end I resorted to rebooting the device (press power button for 20 seconds). Being completely without experience with the Kindle, I was lost for a different way.

As a simple-minded consumer (completely clueless with the Kindle at the moment) and as a software developer I would expect that touching the "Home" icon would take me back to the "original" Kindle launch screen?

Defect or not? RTFM (err, wiki) did not really point me into a specific direction.